Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.

The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.

Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.

The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”

Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400

Cyberskin, radical revealing skin

Developing the most “natural” human-machine interface has always been one of the IT industry Holy Grails. The ancestral codes that oversee our instinctual behaviors are more often than not misguided by cultural signs and related meanings expressed in the software and hardware aesthetic. Playing with these ideas, Cyberskin by Joan Healy brilliantly conveys the idea of the body as an extension of a machine. The author’s passion for the seventies performance scene is perfectly exploited in this piece. In the context of a parody of IT fairs, she hides herself inside a “machine”, so that a rectangular portion of her back can be touched and used by visitors as a touchpad. She secretly “draws” with a real touchpad, her movements tracing the patterns she feels on her back. A monitor displays the marks she makes with the touchpad in front of the user. An accompanying dystopian video documents how workers are exploited in developing countries, manufacturing digital technology parts with endlessly repetitive tasks. The user’s finger skimming over Joan’s skin creates an organic meta-interface. And when visitors touch the most familiar material they ever touched, they invariably fail to recognize it in this completely decontextualized environment. Furthermore, the cause/effect sequence in the machine is also able to obfuscate the senses. This (human) mediation is then able to pollute the interface intimacy as we know it and redefines the respective roles of human and machine, invisibly inserting a (de)stabilizing element in the pre-programmed interaction. The underlying video is then hinting at the radical critique skillfully embodied by the author and her visionary gesture.